


Second-best

by linguamortua



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alcohol Withdrawal, Drug Addiction, Drug Use, Drugged Sex, Hux Hates Himself, Hux Hates His Father, Hux Is An Alcoholic, M/M, Mildly Dubious Consent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-05
Updated: 2016-08-05
Packaged: 2018-07-29 13:44:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,098
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7686829
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/linguamortua/pseuds/linguamortua
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hux's father never appreciated him and never understood him. Hux vowed never to turn into his old man, but each year it seems a little more inevitable. His coping mechanisms - brandy, drugs, Kylo Ren - are barely adequate.</p><p>He hates himself for all of it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Second-best

‘Where the hell did you learn this?’ Hux asked, watching with faintly disapproving interest from the floor as Ren heated the sandy little crystals with casual pyrokinesis. The left corner of Ren's wide mouth twitched up.

'I was a padawan,’ he said, not pleasantly. Almost immediately, Hux's brain generated several dozen questions. He stifled them. Ren was quite intrusive enough without Hux encouraging his tedious displays of emotional intimacy. He tried to picture the old-fashioned braid on Ren as they waited for the smoke to thicken into the right shade of yellow-green. With his shoulders big and hunched and his beak of a nose, Ren presently looked like a bird of prey more than a Jedi. He was rapt, staring at the spiralled glass phial. Elbows on knees, phial carefully suspended in midair. Intense. He did a lot of things like that.

Euphorics held Ren’s interest with particular sharpness; they were rare and costly out here on the edge of civilisation, and there was little time to partake. Hux supposed that he himself had been the instigator. Months ago it had seemed politic to invite his strange new colleague for a drink, and subsequently a fervent argument about the merits of various brandies. Then they had jointly hit upon the idea of securing a better class of sipping alcohol on a brief shore leave - a small collection of bottles which naturally needed to be sampled of an evening.

Ren was desperately weird, a poor conversationalist and a lightweight drinker. Still, he was Hux's only socially acceptable drinking partner. Hux had long ago decided that drinking alone was unwise and that his faintly disreputable habit required a check, lest he become one of those feckless officers with a secret addiction. He would not be manipulated or blackmailed.

Ren had not needed to employ blackmail or manipulation. He had simply appeared after their next refuelling stop with a cluster of small white pills in his hand and held his slightly sweaty palm out to Hux. Hux, lulled by routine and half-comatose with fatigue, had dissolved two of them under his tongue.

‘Better than brandy,’ Ren had said, just before they slipped under.

Now, in Hux's room, sitting cross-legged on Hux’s bed, Ren hovered his mouth over the thin drift of smoke and licked his top lip.

‘Ready?’ Hux asked. And then, trying to hide his impatience, 'I can't imagine Jedi taking euphorics.’

‘They don't,’ said Ren, inhaling and holding his breath as he passed the phial down. Hux sucked in a mouthful just as Ren blew out his breath with a moan.

‘Get angry with you?’ Hux managed as the hit took hold.

‘Not angry,’ said Ren, ‘disappointed.’

Hux well understood disappointment, both in others and in himself, and this understanding had started when he was very young. His father had no interest in children but a faint notion that a son required a firm hand and strict moulding. Hux, a fretful and lonely child, had been a constant disappointment. The entire goal of his life, he had been given to understand, was his successful acceptance into the military; only the officer track would do, and once enlisted he would be expected to excel.

He had failed; rejected. His father had died. Out of some bizarre spite, he had reapplied to the intelligence services. From there the acquisition of military rank had been quite simple, strings pulled, obstacles removed, bodies buried.

‘Here’s your fucking success story,’ Hux muttered to himself, drawing back his upper lip as he leaned into the smoke again and sucked greedily. It burned, coiled, set him on fire. He felt predatory as he watched Ren slipping into his own trance.

‘What,’ said Ren, but the curiosity had already gone from him by the time the word slipped out.

Euphorics made Ren dull and lazy and Hux had realised early on that they smudged away his ability to wield the Force. Without that sharp, powerful connection, Snoke couldn't get a read on him. Ren had no filter when he was high; it hadn't stayed a secret for long. Not when Hux's training had prepared him for ferreting out secrets. So Hux watched as Ren melted back into the bed, chapped lips parting and eyes sliding closed.

Hux’s secrets stayed secret. Ren was only very tenuously a mind-reader.

He was only very tenuously conscious, too, and he barely moved when Hux crawled up onto his bunk, the room shifting with strange angles. Hux kicked at him, shoving him across. Tried to wake him up. This particular drug had the effect, for Hux, of making him intensely warm. Burning, fervent. He focused, now, on the slow heave and sag of Ren’s broad chest as he twitched and breathed in a waking dream.

Hux crawled over to Ren, his body heavy and alive with the slow thump of his pulse. He could hear his breathing roaring up from his chest. Feel the crisp, cool definition of his sheets under his sweaty hands. The thrum of Ren’s life force seemed palpable in these moments of intoxication; had Hux not fundamentally despised the puling, old-world superstitions of Force and Light and Dark he might have found it a religious experience.

Ren was drifting into sleep so Hux jostled him roughly under his eyes flickered open.

‘What,’ he said for the second time. Hux swung a leg over Ren’s hips and settled himself. He stripped off his belt and pulled open his shirt buttons, careless of the tiny things, body too lax to press each through its buttonholes. Ren watched with lazy interest, big hands aflutter a few inches off the bed. Perhaps he thought that he was helping. Certainly his fingers moved as though undoing a shirt. Hux grabbed Ren’s wrists and guided his ungainly paws down to where he could work on Hux’s pants, which the Knight did with his usual inebriated ineptitude.

Hux slapped him for it, and then laughed a bright, delighted cackle when he saw that he had made Ren’s lip bleed. The slow slide of Ren’s tongue over his bleeding mouth — yes, that was what he wanted, and the coiling, hot feeling inside Hux stoked a little higher. Curiosity flared. Hux, despite the way drugs acted upon him, had rarely indulged himself with Ren. Some sloppy, half-asleep groping between them, maybe. This drug was different; it kept him sharper and more alert, while Ren drowsed and stroked his hands idly over his own skin and over Hux’s.

What could he do, with Ren’s power muted? What might he try, with the plausible deniability of the empty phial of euphoric sand on the floor?

Hux pulled his cock from his pants and watched, fascinated, as it bounced free. It distracted him for a moment as he stroked it. Weight and heat. Rhythmic movement; interesting, strange. Then he shook himself and slid up the bed, up to Ren’s wide chest. Ren’s eyes peeled open unevenly and then closed again. His mouth moved, but he didn’t say anything.

Reaching down, Hux pressed his thumb to the bloody smudge on Ren’s full lower lip. Rolled his lip out. Ren smiled vaguely. When Hux slipped his thumb into Ren’s mouth, he ran his tongue over it. Hux shivered, palming at himself. He lifted up on his knees and fed the head of his cock in, navigating past Ren’s teeth and brushing the tip over Ren’s red, wet tongue. It was hot in his mouth, so hot, and soft, and slack. Easy to push in a little more. Ren sighed around it, hands flexing in the sheets, catlike.

A half-inch further. Hux heard himself groan; Ren didn’t answer. He’d gone loose with sleep again. Hux gave him a savage pinch on the inside of his bicep, but there was no response. A quiet, uncomplicated Ren was a delight. Not a twitch. Despite Hux’s distraction (the way the world moved so interestingly, the particular sensations of skin and sheet and warmth, his strange, uncharacteristic calm) it was easy to come, very easy, and when he flooded Ren’s mouth the man shifted slightly, and swallowed, and rubbed a heavy hand over Hux’s hip.

Hux rolled down beside him on the bed and slept heavily. When the shrilling of his alarm woke him five hours later, he had a throbbing headache behind his eyes and an obnoxious mess to clean up. Ren was gone, and so was the empty phial. He pressed the button for the SE-6 domestic droid and hauled himself to the ‘fresher.

He donned his uniform like armour and ate a handful of painkillers, hating the morning, hating himself.

 

* * *

 

Hux certainly did not miss Ren. Ren was in the CF-T299 system, on some nebulous reconnaissance mission for Snoke. The absence of the heavy, brooding weight of his daily presence on the ship was rather relieving. Still, Hux’s equilibrium felt off, somehow. He persevered, maintaining a strict personal schedule. Upon rising, he prepared for his day and ate a spare breakfast. Meetings, paperwork and drills were meticulously scheduled for each of his waking hours. Lunch - brief, plain - eaten in the officers’ mess. A late dinner. Reviewing his daily work before bed. Six hours of sleep. Round and round, every day.

He pushed aside the tedium. His officers were particularly slow and stupid this week, their personnel especially prone to error. A weaker man would have succumbed to the temptation of a drink in the evening. Hux spent more time in the gymnasium, instead. More time at his desk. He resisted the urge to invite Phasma for a drink in the officers’ mess; she was an observant woman and the incongruity of Hux socialising would be noted immediately.

Dozens of completed requisitions forms scrolled down his datapad, signed by the quartermaster and awaiting Hux’s confirmation. Tap and sign, tap and sign. Hux flicked through them, hand sweating a little on the stylus, shaking. He was tired. Of course he was feeling out of sorts. He’d been working very hard. Starkiller was the only thing that kept him going, and of late even the excitement of the project had waned. He wondered where the enthusiasm had gone.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said his father, through the years. ‘One doesn’t have to enjoy work to take pride in it. You’re not a child any more, Armitage.’

‘Fuck you, sir,’ muttered Hux into his datapad, remembering acutely the smell of brandy on his father’s breath as he’d lambasted Hux for daring to express an opinion.

There was a little brandy left in the cabinet, now that he thought about it. He popped the cap off and sniffed it; very good, warm and spicy. Very carefully, he poured himself a perfect two fingers and swirled it around.

He was nothing like his father. He poured it down the sink, in the end, and went to bed without dinner.

Ren would be back in three days.

 

* * *

 

‘Damn you,’ said Hux, without heat. The words drifted out of his mouth on a wisp of smoke. They were an interesting shape. If he concentrated, he thought he could see the letters forming in the blue-grey haze above their heads.

‘Mm,’ answered Ren. His pupils were huge and his big hand was up in the air, opening and closing like he was trying to catch a fish. Force-gestures. Except they were both so high that Ren couldn’t have lit a candle. Sticky green chunks of sap, burned up in a long pipe; something Ren had found while he was away. A delicacy, he said. Learned from an uncle he had once known. A dangerous treat.

‘Can you hear my thoughts right now?’ Hux asked. Ren giggled, his face all scrunched up. He touched Hux’s temple, and then his mouth. Mouths. There was an idea forming in Hux’s head. He rolled over and anchored his hands in Ren’s shirt. And kissed him. Ren tasted burnt and smoky and rich. That was new. He kissed lazily, so Hux bit him. There was blood. Ren touched his bleeding lip and giggled again, and painted a pink stripe across Hux’s forehead like warpaint.

‘Now you’re Hux of Ren,’ he said. The blood burned on Hux’s skin, and he thought he felt arcane power seeping into his brain, and his eyes rolled back in his head. ‘Don’t faint,’ Ren said. ‘Knights don’t faint.’ And he laughed, and Hux laughed too.

 

* * *

 

‘One more?’ Ren asked with poorly feigned casualness, a week later. He held his hand open, big palm dwarfing the little red pill.

‘Damn you, Ren,’ Hux sighed, as he always did, and he reached out.

 

* * *

 

The world blurred.


End file.
